by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

“Over-communicating is the glue that holds a high-performing team together and keeps them focused in the same direction. And, it circles back to clarity. Without good, consistent communication, you don’t have clarity.” ―  Lee Ellis, leadership consultant, author, presenter, retired colonel, USAF.

As managers, it’s drilled into us that we shouldn’t micromanage —that instead, we should hire well-qualified, intelligent self-starters, then give them their instructions and get out of the way. And while this strategy is generally sound, you’ll always find some exceptions that test the rule.

In recent years, some business experts have begun backing off a bit from the approach outlined above, expounding on the virtues of overcommunication. In the past, we’ve been told not to overwhelm employees with information, and ideally to establish a single type of communication—whether face-to-face meeting, email, or phone — by which to convey our instructions. Overcommunicate subverts those concepts. But while it may seem intrusive, this doesn’t mean it it’s unnecessary. The business landscape has changed significantly in the past five years, largely in response to reality of COVID, the resulting lockdowns, and the concurrent rise of remote work. This may have forced changes in your direction, or may do so as you move forward.

Therefore, consider overcommunication as an option, along with these five tips for wielding it.

1. It need not be difficult or harsh. Applying overcommunication can prove as simple as a quick question: “How’s it going with the Kowalksy report?” Many manager already do this, so if you’re one of them, keep it up. Similarly, you can shoot someone an email occasionally just to check on a product’s status, or call as a follow-up to a meeting.
2. Overcommunicate in times of crisis or change. When the future seems uncertain, keep in constant touch with your team. Make check-ins, updates, and follow-ups part of your regular tool-kit, providing consistent and clear communication to ensure everyone understands a project’s details and milestones. Make sure they know what you need of them, so you can keep team productivity on point. Under-communicating at such times, or even just communicating at normal levels, may make team members feel lost and confused.

3. Overcommunicate to clarify messages from leadership. A single company-wide meeting won’t cut it, because even if your team members take copious notes, all the messages won’t get through to everyone. Reemphasize your organization’s mission, vision, goals, and priorities immediately after such a meeting, whenever someone new joins your team (even if it’s an in-company hire), and at regular intervals thereafter. Don’t flood them with such reminders, but do encourage your team to frequently reconsider your leadership’s messages.
   

5. Overcommunicate with remote workers. The COVID and post-COVID eras have taught many employees they can work just fine remotely, which makes it doubly important they understand your directions. Overcommunication becomes a must, since (a) remote work may cause workers to lose their sense of acting as part of a team; and (b) Skype and Zoom notwithstanding, your team members can’t communicate with you face-to-face. Ask them to let you know if they’re confused, and follow up your instructions. Just don’t descend to the level of “infotoxication,” where overwhelm creates further confusion.
   
6. Try multiple methods of communication. Here’s another point where the overcommunication focus breaks with tradition. Instead of sticking exclusively with one method of communicating information, orders, and directions to your team, mix it up a little. Again, after a meeting, you might send out emails clarifying the details of the new assignment. If you usually stick to email, follow up with calls, voice messages, or (if possible), face-to-face meetings with key team members.

Steering Clear of Confusion

Although the hands-off approach may be ideal, it doesn’t always reflect reality. Sometimes, you just have to talk too much for your directives to get through intact.  Advertisers have practices this for at least a hundred years. It’s not as necessary in a newspaper, since newsprint is static, but think about it; how many times do radio and TV ads repeat their toll-free numbers? In their books, business opportunity gurus and marketers tend to repeat the same information at least twice, even three or four times. They realize you might miss it the first time around.

Despite your careful charting of the course at the beginning of your trip, as with any voyage, you need to perform a reality check occasionally and then do whatever’s necessary to get back on course. Reality may have shifted in such a way that your original directions may not always apply, or your communication methods may have developed gaps that don’t let some things through. If this is true, it’s time to overcommunicate so your people understand everything you’re trying to tell them, in ways that help bridge any gaps.

© 2024 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is known as The Productivity Pro^®. She is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. For 30+ years, she has given keynote speeches and workshops on increasing workplace productivity in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including the bestselling What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do. She is a past president of the National Speakers Association and a member of the exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame. To book Laura speak at an upcoming meeting or event, contact her at www.TheProductivityPro.com.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.” ― Larry Page, co-inventor of the Google search engine.

Is there anyone in the Western world who hasn’t seen (or at least heard about) the Terminator or Matrix movie franchises? As much as we’ve loved our Tamagotchis, Furbys, and Roombas, we still worry our digital and robotic creations will grow beyond us so fast and so far they’ll learn to hate us or simply become indifferent to our presence, destroying us in the process. Even the late Stephen Hawking, probably one of the most intelligent people to ever live, worried it might happen.

Hawking aside, those who fear technology typically do so because they don’t understand it. This has occurred throughout history. Some cavemen probably rejected that newfangled spear-thingy—until it proved itself in action. Consider weaver Ned Ludd, who supposedly destroyed two stocking-knitting machines in 1779, afraid they would take his job. Some alarmists in the 1800s thought riding trains would kill them, because the speed would rip them apart or cause them to suffocate; and parents in the 1920s refused to let their children listen to the radios for fear it would “enthrall” them. Those fears proved groundless. In the 1980s, many people thought computers would replace them, when in fact they just made most of us more productive. This type of mistrust has also hampered the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Computer scientists first proposed AI in the 1950s, though research stalled for decades starting in the 1970s, due to the fears so well illustrated by the abovementioned movies. Since the beginning of the 2020s, however, research in AI has boomed, with the resulting products now starting to revolutionize business… in a good way. Generative AI (GenAI), which can create new content based on prompts human users input, has proven especially productive.

Consider these good reasons to welcome these handy programs.

1. AI is easy to use. The hardest part is installing the program, and that’s not hard at all. When you’ve got your GenAI tool up and running, you can provide it with simple text prompts, telling it what to create or how to edit an existing text, image, song, or other “modality,” as the industry calls them. Some AIs can even convert one modality to another, like an image to a text.
   

2. AI can automate repetitive tasks. The ultimate goal of GenAI—contrary to popular belief—is to make jobs easier, not to replace them. GenAI is a tool, just like your computer, printer, phone, or other software. If you have repetitive tasks you take care of every day or week, like standardized reports, spreadsheets, or other routine documents, you can use GenAI to handle them. It’s also great for data analysis, research (much better than search engines), and administrative tasks. It can even organize your calendar, take care of some email, or schedule meetings.

3. AI works great for customer service. GenAI can offer customer service agents real-time recommendations on how to respond to customers during support calls. Such programs can also provide links to internal documents that explain technical issues. One study has shown that AI helpers can make customer support workers 14% more productive by it making easier to address customer issues. Less experienced and less-skilled workers saw even greater results from GenAI use, boosting their productivity by an average of 35%.

4. AI can help coders write software. In one study involving 70 experienced programmers who regularly coded an average of nine hours per day, half used a GenAI tool to help them perform a specific programming task, while the others coded without using AI at all. Those who used the AI tool finished in an average of 1.2 hours, while the control group took an average of 2.7 hours. That means the GenAI tool helped its users complete their tasks more than twice as fast (126%) as those who didn’t use the tool. Imagine your workers producing twice as much in a single week, just because they adopted a simple-to-use software program!

Moving Right Along

You may be thinking, “Generative AIs seem almost too easy to use.” Maybe so, but it’s poised to take productivity to a whole new level. Not so long ago, fears of triggering apocalyptic scenarios hamstrung efforts to develop AI for benevolent uses. But the recent business benefits are impressive. Some alarmists still scream about the perils of chatbots and virtual assistants, and fiction editors hate AI, for good reason. But it’s proven profitable and safe in business contexts, and it hasn’t taken over the world.

So far, so good.

© 2024 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is known as The Productivity Pro^®. She is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. For 30+ years, she has given keynote speeches and workshops on increasing workplace productivity in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including the bestselling What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do. She is a past president of the National Speakers Association and a member of the exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame. To book Laura speak at an upcoming meeting or event, contact her at www.TheProductivityPro.com.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

“The best laid schemes of mice and men/often go astray.” ― Scottish poet Robert Burns

Sometimes, unexpected events occur that tear apart a carefully planned life. Hopefully this hasn’t happened to you, but if it ever does, your productivity is likely to come crashing down… and really, no one could blame you. But some people might anyway. You may even lose a job, especially in this gig economy where speed reigns supreme.

This recently happened to a colleague of mine, who had been his mother’s primary caregiver for several years. In March 2023, they experienced a perfect storm of health crises, culminating in his mother entering her final illness. My colleague focused tightly on his mother’s health, to the point where he ignored his clients, and ultimately lost a few. His mother died in June and his best friend followed a few months later, sending him into a deep malaise during which his output tanked. After a difficult recovery, he finally began to rebuild his clientele and productivity.

When life throws you curve balls, you can and must fond the strength to rebuild your work-life and productivity until you recapture your previous level of efficiency. Your only other choice is to give up. Here are a few suggestions on how to rebuild:

1. Ponder the problem. Consider how you can rectify your situation, first determining where you want to be and how to get there. This may be different from where you were before everything collapsed; indeed, it may have to be, if your original work situation triggered the collapse, or if there are things you simply no longer care to do. Whatever the case, break your rebound down into smaller, easier-to-accomplish pieces and lay out a rough version of the path from here to there, while leaving enough room to make any necessary changes as you go.
2. Just get started. This advice is standard (if unsaid) for any project, but it’s doubly appropriate in this case. When you’ve hit an emotional roadblock, getting back in the saddle may be the hardest part of rebuilding. But you can’t remain stalled for long or you’ll just sink deeper into the mire, and it’ll become ever harder to move forward. So push yourself to start working on the first step ASAP, even if it feels like you’re pulling teeth just to get anything done. A famous exercise for breaking writer’s block, for example, is to start by typing the word “The” at the top of the page, and then to push yourself to keep writing until things make sense.
3. Don’t take too long. It took my colleague eight months to even want to pick himself up off the ground, and he’s not yet back to his old productivity levels as of this writing (late-April 2024), though he’s working on it. Give yourself time to recover from whatever struck you down in the first place; but the quicker you can get moving again, the easier it will be for everyone involved.
4. Approach lost clients with offers they can’t ignore… and that won’t last forever. This assumes you still want to work for them. Keep in mind, however, that it’s often easier to mend a previously existing relationship than to rebuild your client list from scratch. A discount on the next project or a quicker deadline may prove attractive in these budget-conscious days, and might help you regain some of your clients or end-users if you have an otherwise excellent record. Speaking of which…
5. Focus on quality. When you complete new products for your clients or end-users, focus on maintaining the highest level of quality as possible. Again, this is standard and usually goes unsaid, but it’s worth re-emphasizing. Give yourself extra lead times when you can, and be sure to review every part of the project before you turn it in. Don’t obsess (or you may never really get started), but give the project the time it requires to maximize its excellence.

Don’t overdo it!

Once you’ve started to pick up and rebuild, keep moving forward—but don’t take on more than you can handle. That’s another route to failure, especially if you over-promise and can’t deliver. Most clients can handle occasional slipped deadlines, as long as you maintain decent communication, and maybe one massive failure to communicate and/or produce, as happened with my colleague. But don’t expect them to accept it twice. Nor should they. It’s unprofessional once; twice, and you may find yourself starting over yet again.

Got any other tips for recapturing productivity? Let us know in the comments!

© 2024 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is known as The Productivity Pro^®. She is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. For 30+ years, she has given keynote speeches and workshops on increasing workplace productivity in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including the bestselling What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do. She is a past president of the National Speakers Association and a member of the exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame. To book Laura speak at an upcoming meeting or event, contact her at www.TheProductivityPro.com.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

“Don’t count the days; make the days count.” ― Muhammed Ali, American boxer.

We’d all like to work less, wouldn’t we? It would be nice to take our retirement in installments, like John D. McDonald’s sleuth Travis Magee, but that’s not an option for most of us.

One thing many of us try to do is arrange to work fewer days. This usually involves cramming the same 40 hours into fewer days, such as working four ten-hour days while taking Fridays off. But with “flex-time,” as it’s generally called, you still end up working 40-hour weeks, minimum.

But how about shorter workweeks, period? Study after study has shown that workweeks of 32-36 hours tend to be more fruitful than their 40-hour counterparts. Here are four reasons why:

1. Productivity increases. Obviously, there’s a point of diminishing returns, but salaried people who’ve tested workweeks of 32-36 hours tend to perform better and accomplish more than their colleagues who work a traditional eight-hour day, five days a week. And they do better than those who work longer than 40 hours per week. They’re more efficient and productive, with less wasted time — possibly because they’re quite aware they have less time they can
2. Workers are happier. Happier, healthier workers more easily embrace their jobs and perform better. Pretty much self-explanatory. With shorter weeks, workers experience less job-related stress, get more rest, often have more pleasant commutes, and, for parents, experience less worry about childcare. They also have more time for themselves, their families, and their favorite pursuits. Add it all up, and it results in greater happiness.
3. Workers are healthie We know that healthier people are more productive, even if they work fewer hours per week than the average bear. They experience fewer stress-related illnesses, take fewer sick days, feel better rested, display more flexibility, and are less likely to experience burnout. In the end, this results in less time lost to illness, which, again, can resulted in a greater percentage of productive hours than longer, stressful workweeks.
4. Workers are more loyal. Happier, healthier employees are less likely to leave for greener pastures. Employees of the Millennial and Gen-Z cohorts don’t have the baked-in company loyalty their parents and grandparents had, probably because they’ve seen how corporate loyalty toward employees melted away after the dotcom bubble popped, especially during the Great Recession. Amazon just announced it is dumping 16,000 employees. Hence the lack of loyalty on the employee side of the aisle. A shorter workweek would be very attractive and make them not as apt to leave.

Positive Feedback

All four of these factors reinforce each other in the best productive sense. Workers prove happier and healthier when they work fewer than 40 hours per week; happiness breeds greater health and vice versa; loyal workers work harder for you because they’re happier and feel better, increasing the happiness and productivity all around… you get the picture. It’s a kind of positive feedback loop.

We’ll never cut our work hours back to George Jetson’s three hours a day, three days a week, or Tim Ferriss’s optimistic four-hour workweek. But we can easily cut back our regular workweeks by four to eight hours, and according to the science, still get all our work done.

© 2023 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is known as The Productivity Pro®. She is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. For 30 years, she has given keynote speeches and workshops on increasing workplace productivity in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including the bestselling What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do. She is a past president of the National Speakers Association and a member of the exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame. To book Laura speak at an upcoming meeting or event, contact her at www.TheProductivityPro.com.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

“…A new generation is on the rise, and the first step to communicating with them is understanding they aren’t just another Millennial.” ― Pamela La Gioia, American business author.

The post-Millennial generation of workers, born from about 1995 -2010, has now entered the American workplace in earnest. Some 74 million strong, this diverse cohort comprises about one-quarter of our population, and almost 40% of the workforce. They’re more plugged into the digital world than any generation before them and have never known any other lifestyle.

Although Generation Z’s oldest members have worked steadily for a decade, some business pundits still don’t know what to think of them or how to handle them. And as with Millennials, many of the experts’ expectations regarding Gen Z have proven mostly wrong.

The Entitlement Refrain

It’s amusing, sometimes, to look at early opinions of changing business paradigms. As Millennials were still getting firmly established, older business generations often misconstrued their independence and lackluster corporate loyalty — fueled by the ways businesses treated their parents during the dotcom bust and Great Recession — as lack of focus and laziness. Some observers initially assumed the newest generation of workers would wind up acting even more entitled, self-indulgent, and self-centered than they thought the Millennials were.

Fast forward ten years or so, and there’s still little consensus about what to expect of Gen Z overall. However, there are a few things that most observers agree on. It turns out Generation Z is more conservative than Millennials, moving back toward the Baby Boomer/Generation X idea of business, though they still have an entrepreneurial mindset. Some experts are disturbed by the perception that Gen Z’s devices seem grafted to their hands and think this will certainly diminish productivity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Here’s what you can expect of Generation Z workers in terms of productivity:

1. They’re not just a bunch of geeky kids. They’re just more tech-savvy than older generations, since they grew up with the technology. Some view their reliance on social media as distracting and isolating, though Gen Z members themselves see it as a way to connect with people all over the world. To them, it’s a form of global networking — which can become productive indeed as they make connections with potential business partners, the worldwide audience, and the global workforce. They often see their devices as extensions of themselves. All they need to do is harness and channel these interconnective tendencies to leverage them productively. Furthermore, they’re comfortable with digital data and analytics and tend to be creative and design oriented. In most ways, their digital competence serves as a strength; and smart managers, no matter their generation, will take this into account. 

2. They’re motivated to make contributions to the world, and by extension, to their organizations. If they get the feedback they crave, they’ll give freely of their time and energy. They enjoy volunteering and participating in community work the company gets behind. 

3. They’re more conservative than Millennials. Gen Z workers are more likely to follow older generation’s’ ideals of structured work and hierarchies than Millennials. Despite their digital orientation, they value the human connection with their teams and prefer facetime with their leaders, with frequent feedback. As a group, they’re less prone to expect validation, and view failure as a chance to learn — the old “fail forward” concept older work generations will find familiar. They’re also very competitive and driven by financial and career goals.

4. They prefer personalized work experiences. In this, Gen Z workers do resemble Millennials. More than a third of them (fewer so far than Millennials) see work/life balance as a priority and take this into account when choosing jobs. While more are loyal to their employers, they still want to have things their way — and in many cases they can get that, with remote working and by leveraging the gig economy. They’re also quite entrepreneurial and like their “side hustles,” though perhaps less so than Millennials. They value independence, though prefer job security more than Millennials.

 Engage, Engage, Engage!

 For the foreseeable future, Generation Z will comprise a significant portion of the workforce, and within a decade, may well dominate it. If you can engage their drive to achieve and contribute, you’ll enjoy fantastic productivity from them… but isn’t this true for every generation? Business insiders suggest mentoring and managing them with Millennials, letting them try and fail if necessary, and encouraging them to think on their feet. Let them use their devices for research and connection and take advantage of their familiarity with technology in any other way than benefits your business.

© 2023 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is known as The Productivity Pro®. She is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. For 30 years, she has given keynote speeches and workshops on increasing workplace productivity in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including the bestselling What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do. She is a past president of the National Speakers Association and a member of the exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame. To book Laura speak at an upcoming meeting or event, contact her at www.TheProductivityPro.com.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

“Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.” — Ginny Rometty, American business executive

Artificial intelligence (AI) gets a bad rap in pop culture. For every fictional Jarvis or David, there are a half-dozen Skynets or Ultrons. In the real world, most workers believe artificial intelligence is something we’re still waiting on. But it’s already off and running in corporations around the world, though not necessarily in forms people tend to think of when they hear the term “artificial intelligence.” Some visionary authors call what we have “artificial stupids,” but whatever you call them, they can get the job done.

The job, in this case, is making human workers more productive by handing the reins for repetitive, dull tasks to silicon coworkers. I’m not talking about robots, and no one intends these AIs to take over human jobs. These AIs consist of increasingly sophisticated software boost personal productivity at work, based primarily on machine learning culled from previous data.

Let’s look at a few ways AI has already begun to help out:

1. Forecasting. By assessing past data from your business or department, and testing hundreds or thousands of models using your data, AIs can help forecast the outcomes of any potential decision or approach. It can also consider innovation, potential disruptions, or supply-and-demand changes based on existing or potential conditions. This may sound more useful to manufacturers of widgets than to classic white-collar offices, but keep in mind that we still manufacture our own kinds of products for our end-users, whether they be white papers or computer programs. Besides, standard manufacturing firms also have white-collar offices to handle the technology used in production and make predictions for next year, quarter, and decade. Given the proper constraints, an AI can learn from its past errors, optimize its data based on what it’s learned, and move forward based on its new conclusions — 24/7. It can also use this information to develop algorithms to predict when maintenance and upgrades to its own system are needed.

2. Security. These days, the only way to avoid data theft is to use computers completely cut off from the World Wide Web. That just doesn’t cut it if your business model requires an online presence. Even if it doesn’t, most white-collar businesses need dedicated access to the internet so workers can more easily do their jobs and communicate with one another. Many businesses have some level of human security to protect their real assets and people, but increasingly, they also require a high level of cybersecurity to protect data, intellectual property, and other intangible assets. AIs provide an unsleeping eye to safeguard all these: by learning to recognize cyber-attacks based on algorithms developed after previous attacks, by closely monitoring input from outside, and by shutting down access to sensitive files/systems as necessary. They can even help backtrack the attackers to their source, to block further attacks. While script kiddies and other hackers remain a serious concern, with the proper AI cybersecurity, they aren’t as worrisome as they once were. 

3. Research and Personal Assistants. Digital assistants aren’t exactly new, but as AI has evolved in recent years, they’ve become much easier to use and more reliable. Now, with a few instructions, they can handle your email, keep your calendar in hand, and streamline other processes with simple suggestions. This are straightforward tasks evolved from Clippy and Microsoft Bob of the pre-Y2K era (look ’em up). But the most useful thing about these assistants is that they can sift through enormous masses of data with ease, allowing you to do the kind of research that might not have been possible a decade ago. Before search engines alone, research was a much more onerous task, which could require months of library work and, in some cases, prohibitive levels of travel.

Being pure software, AIs not only don’t need time off, but they also can process basic data much faster than anything human. As a result, they can relieve us of a great deal of tedium and allow us to discover connections that help us develop or refine products and continue evolving our technology. The examples here are just a few ways AI can increase efficiency, and thus productivity, in the modern business world; soon we’ll be seeing many others.

© 2022 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is known as The Productivity Pro®. She is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. For 30 years, she has given keynote speeches and workshops on increasing workplace productivity in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including the bestselling What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do. She is a past president of the National Speakers Association and a member of the exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame. To book Laura speak at an upcoming meeting or event, contact her at www.TheProductivityPro.com.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

 “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”—Peter Drucker.

Making predictions about the future of productivity can be dangerous business. Remember all those people who predicted that the Internet would be a flash in the pan? Yeah, me neither. What I do remember is how wrong they were.

That said, I’m going to make a few predictions about what might happen in 2023 in the productivity field, based on what we’re all hearing lately.

1. Inflation will continue to eat at your productivity. Inflation has many causes, so we’re not looking to blame it on anyone here. But as prices for everyday costs like food, housing, and energy rise, some substantially, your dollars buy less — especially, as has been the case for decades, when pay doesn’t rise as fast as costs do. This strikes at both individuals and businesses. When business and labor costs rise, productivity — rate of output (i.e., profit) per unit of input —inevitably drops. Until the Fed gets its act together, and if President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act works, we won’t tame inflation anytime soon — especially if it rises globally, as seems to be the case. That’s the bad news, but the next few points seem more positive.

2. Remote work will continue to be common, and likely increase. Many knowledge workers have already proven that it works for them, and that they’re just as productive as ever, if not more so. They get to work in comfortable environs, can spend more time with family, don’t have to lay out as much money for childcare, and their commune is measured in steps rather than miles and wasted time. If you can do your work in the time required, does it matter where you do it? You may sacrifice face time with co-workers, but that’s what Zoom and GoTo are for, and no one but office planners really likes the open office or cube farm concepts anyway. Besides, less real estate used means less rent, which increases fiscal productivity.

3. We’ll see more freelancers. In a phenomenon related to #2, as employers demand workers to return to the office, I expect to see the Great Resignation continue as happy remote workers refuse to return for the above reasons. They may have to pay for their own insurance and have few benefits, but this isn’t always a big deal for younger workers, and often contractors can nab larger per-hour wages because they do have to take care of their own benefits. As more people become contractors and tap into the gig economy, I’d expect to see more “digital nomads.” Some remote workers have already relocated to cheaper states and even cheaper countries — often without telling anyone —and can’t easily go back anyway. Their reasoning is that they can do remote work effectively almost anywhere — because they can. 

4. We’ll see the first forays into VR conferencing. Forget Zoon and Skype. If Mark Zuckerberg has his way, virtual meetings will soon morph into virtual reality Zuckerberg is investing in getting a service called Metaverse in place, so you put on your VR headset and meet your co-workers in a shared virtual environment of your choice to discuss work topics and otherwise keep in touch. Whether this will win over those of us sick of seeing our colleagues on computer screens, some of whom may prefer phone conversations by this point, remains to be seen. But once it works, I suspect it will contribute to the predictions #2 and #3 above. We’ve already have a decentralized global workforce forming for the last few decades. Effective VR could accelerate this trend. 

Working My Way Back To You

Looking back, price inflation seems inevitable to some economists, as many workers return to the global market with plenty of savings from the lockdowns of the pandemics, while competing over fewer resources, due to closed factories and other service providers. (They could have figured this out earlier and warned us.) That will likely impact both individual and mass productivity in many disciplines. However, I think the pandemic has also freed workers in many ways, by giving them more power decide when and where they may work. This is not just to their benefits. With no commutes and fewer expenses, some workers may do the same jobs for less, and employers need not pay for nearly as much real estate and some benefits. In time, the productivity benefits should become obvious to all — and inflation won’t last forever.

Did we miss your favorite prediction? Let us know in the comments!

© 2022 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on employee and team productivity. She is the president of The Productivity Pro, Inc., a company dedicated to helping leaders increase workplace performance in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including FASTER TOGETHER: Accelerating Your Team’s Productivity (Berrett-Koehler 2018). She is a past president of the National Speakers Association, and a member of its exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame (with fewer than 175 members worldwide). Stack’s clients include Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, and Bank of America, and she has been featured on the CBS Early Show and CNN, and in the New York Times. To have Laura Stack speak at an upcoming meeting or event, call 303-471-7401 or contact us online.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

 “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”—Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist, in War and Peace.

Late in June 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the results of the previous year’s American Time Use Study (ATUS), as it has annually since 2003. I’ve reported on it each year for more than a decade. The ATUS data for 2020, released in 2021, reflected significant effects from the COVID-19 pandemic that has gripped the nation since March 2020. Fortunately, during 2021, the crisis loosened its stranglehold on the economy, allowing it to bounce back to pre-plague levels. However, the economy has since fallen behind again due to the rise of the worst inflation since the 1980s (sure to be a significant factor in next year’s report).

A reminder: the ATUS study covers all individuals over 15 years old, including full-time high school and college students, the disabled, the unemployed, and retirees. It also covers every day of the week, including weekends and holidays. Therefore, the average hour per day worked may, at first glance, seem low. However, these numbers are averages for every day and every person, including those who didn’t work or worked only part time. In the 2021 data, it also includes almost 2 million people holding multiple jobs.

Home Work
While the 2021 work statistics resemble those of 2019, one difference from pre-COVID stats is a continuation of a phenomenon I’ve long seen as inevitable, but COVID just accelerated its development. The sharp increase in working from home reported last year continued in 2021, especially among professionals, with minor changes. No real surprise there, given the continuing pandemic and the fact that both workers and employers have become accustomed to people working from home. Indeed, a significant percentage of workers have refused to return to the traditional workplace, resulting in what employers have dubbed “the Great Resignation” when they’ve been pressed by employers to return (I’ve blogged about this recently).

As the pandemic forced continued use of videoconferencing and telecommuting technology (e.g., Skype and Zoom), 38% of employees did some or all their work from home, as opposed to 68% who did some or all their work from their workplace (these numbers exceed 100% because some workers did both). The 38% of individuals who worked at home in 2021 is down a bit from the 42% who worked from home during the 10 months recorded for 2020. That year, the reporting was late in starting, as the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest. In 2021, those who worked at their workplaces averaged 7.84 hours on an average day they worked; people who worked at home worked an average of 5.61 days on days they worked. This lower number for those who worked at home may reflect less time spent commuting; however, again, this average includes all days of the week and holidays, which suggests most Americans are working significantly longer than the “standard” 40 hours per week.

Thirty-five percent of men worked at home on an average day, down a bit from 36% in 2020, while the number of women working from home dropped sharply from 49% to 41.5%, possibly because many children returned to school in 2021 and no longer needed home schooling and at-home supervision. Overall, workers in management and with higher levels of education tended to work more from home that those with less education. For example, 67% of workers with advanced degrees worked from home on days they worked, while just 19% of those with only a high school diploma did.

A bit under 51% of the population 15 years old or older worked in 2021, higher than the pre-COVID 2019 level of 49%, as opposed to an average of 39% in 2020. Clearly, millions of people were back to work as COVID restrictions eased nationwide and their jobs returned. The average number of hours worked on days worked (including weekends) rose to 7.75 as opposed to 7.6 in 2020, springing back above the 2019 level of 7.7. As counted by ATUS, “employed persons” includes full-time workers and part-time workers, which also lowers the average number of hours worked to below the expected eight hours; but interestingly, the sum across seven days adds up to over 50 hours weekly for the average worker.

The Takeaway
It’s clear that in 2021, the economy had begun to recover from COVID. It continued to stabilize for most of 2021, before inflation hit late in the year and in early 2022. In next year’s ATUS article, I expect to report a downturn in the economy, as we’re officially already in recession, though it’s hard to say how that will affect jobs. Non-salary workers may work longer, while both salary and wage workers may get part-time hourly-wage jobs on top of their main jobs to offset the increased costs of necessities like food and energy. We’ll see.So: how did the pandemic affect your work in 2021? Let us know in the Comments section.

© 2022 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on employee and team productivity. She is the president of The Productivity Pro, Inc., a company dedicated to helping leaders increase workplace performance in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including FASTER TOGETHER: Accelerating Your Team’s Productivity (Berrett-Koehler 2018). She is a past president of the National Speakers Association, and a member of its exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame (with fewer than 175 members worldwide). Stack’s clients include Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, and Bank of America, and she has been featured on the CBS Early Show and CNN, and in the New York Times. To have Laura Stack speak at an upcoming meeting or event, call 303-471-7401 or contact us online.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

Few things have changed the modern workplace more than the COVID-19 pandemic. Large-scale remote work, which many corporations tried and discarded as unmanageable not so long ago, suddenly became required in most businesses. Nascent and underutilized technologies experienced rapid development and widespread implementation. While the pandemic paralyzed some industries for a while, the white-collar world not only adapted quickly, but it also thrived. According to most studies, individual productivity increased slightly after employees went home to work. Familiar surroundings, flexible schedules, and a lack of commutes led to happier, more engaged, and less-stressed workers… to the point where most of the rank and file simply didn’t and still don’t want return to the office.

Employers, conversely, want their workers back. They have properties and mortgages to pay, and they need people filling those seats to get a return on their investment. They also claim greater value for face-to-face meetings than remote ones, an increased sense of camaraderie in the office, and easier communication of ideas between employees. Some analysts suggest they also want to regain more direct control over their employees.

Since mid-2021, when many companies began to urge or order their people back to the office, they’ve experienced significant pushback. The recently remote workers are content and productive, having proven to anyone willing to notice that work location doesn’t always count if they do their assigned work. A surprising number have proven willing to quit if they don’t get their way.

How can employers adapt to this new reality? Consider these suggestions.

1. Go with the flow. I’ve long believed that the workplace would eventually decentralize, though I never suspected a pandemic would cause it. Before, we were like honeybees, working and producing in a central hive. Now we’re like mason bees, just as productive but solitary in our own little holes, still making plenty of honey. We’re in contact with our teams; we just don’t see them every day, and don’t need to. I realize this weakens the traditional manager/employee and team bonds to some extent, at least for those supervisors unwilling to put in extra effort. However, remote work allows the organization in general to (a) save a ton of money by maintaining less real estate; (b) pay less for the requisite utilities, insurance, and associated costs; and (c) tap a much larger pool of workers. In addition, studies show that many workers will consider accepting lower pay if they don’t have to come into the office as often, especially those with long commutes. Again, more easy savings. And remember: it’s cheaper to keep experienced employees than to train up new ones.

2. Adopt a hybrid environment. Some workers will want to come back to the office. So, keep some of them in house, and let others stay remote where possible. Plenty of businesses were already doing this in a limited way when the pandemic hit, especially for short-term specialists like coders and tech writers. But if you have a bunch of permanent full-time workers already working remotely, and it’s effective, why not give them the option, too? Then you can consolidate and save money.

3. Sweeten the pot. If you need your employees to return to the office, make it easier for them. Pay for their commutes. Offer childcare services or stipends. Improve their benefits, let their shares vest earlier, or provide better matching for their 401k’s. You’ll discover many ways you can lure workers back to a centralized location if you give it some thought. 

Much to the astonishment of the business world, several 2021 polls indicated that a high percentage of white-collar employees who were then working remotely because of the pandemic (40% to 95%, depending on the source) would quit their jobs if their employers tried to force them back to the office. And millions have, in a trend pundits call “the Great Resignation.” As of March 2022, the monthly Quits Rate in non-farm jobs, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen to a record high of 3% (also achieved in November and December 2021). In April 2020, it was half that.

If you’re a white-collar employer, and you aren’t getting pushback on this issue yet, you probably soon will. How you handle it will determine the future of your business—and whether it survives.

© 2022 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on employee and team productivity. She is the president of The Productivity Pro, Inc., a company dedicated to helping leaders increase workplace performance in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including FASTER TOGETHER: Accelerating Your Team’s Productivity (Berrett-Koehler 2018). She is a past president of the National Speakers Association, and a member of its exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame (with fewer than 175 members worldwide). Stack’s clients include Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, and Bank of America, and she has been featured on the CBS Early Show and CNN, and in the New York Times. To have Laura Stack speak at an upcoming meeting or event, call 303-471-7401 or contact us online.

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by Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE

In a rapidly changing environment, it’s no surprise that new “buzzwords” occasionally pop up on your bingo card. One of recent example is upskilling. At first glance, the definition seems obvious, but it means more than you might think—especially after our shared ordeal with the COVID-19 pandemic. These days, we all need to take the time to upskill and refresh our work habits, which the World Economic Forum predicts will raise the global GDP by up to $6.5 trillion by 2030.

Upskilling involves taking your work to the next level, to better fit your job’s current and future needs. It’s not good enough to just tread water. You must consistently work to advance your career, if only to keep pace with change. The white-collar professional never really stops learning. Here are a few tips to make sure you’re advancing as you should.

1. Keep working on your people skills. Soft skills like emotional intelligence (EQ), willing cooperation, and tact have always had a place in our field. As we evolve more toward remote and hybrid work environments, these will be more important than ever for camaraderie and a sense of teamwork.

2. Hone your communications skills. Again, this skill has always been important, but has become increasingly essential as the workplace evolves. On a conference call, and even to some extent on a videoconference, you don’t always have the social cues that let other people pick up on the nuances of your messages, and vice versa. You certainly don’t with email or IMs, so take some time to learn how to state your opinion or the facts simply and clearly, whether verbally or in writing. This will cut down on misunderstandings, bottlenecks, and roadblocks.

3. Read, read, read. It’s especially important to read widely in your field, so you can keep up with new developments and make contributions to your organization. But also read widely in other fields, including fiction and current events. Creative applications may help you handle a tough problem at work, and planting ideas in your subconscious mind can result in new, profitable concepts as the ideas cross-fertilize. 

4. Keep educating yourself. Whether it’s getting a new license or certification, taking a continuing education class, or learning the latest programming language, don’t hesitate to do it. I joined a forum and learned how to start and run a nonprofit. It may involve pushing yourself out of your comfort zone or paying for it yourself, but if it will advance your career, it can be worth the cost and effort. 

Biting the Bullet

Upskilling is vital unless you want your career to stall. And frankly, it mostly consists of simple things you should do anyway. Some, like training, may be covered by your organization, and some you can do during downtime and breaks, like keeping up with your reading. Upskilling doesn’t have to be hard; you just need to keep at it and not get complacent. What can you do to shake things up?

© 2022 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on employee and team productivity. She is the president of The Productivity Pro, Inc., a company dedicated to helping leaders increase workplace performance in high-stress environments. Stack has authored eight books, including FASTER TOGETHER: Accelerating Your Team’s Productivity (Berrett-Koehler 2018). She is a past president of the National Speakers Association, and a member of its exclusive Speaker Hall of Fame (with fewer than 175 members worldwide). Stack’s clients include Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, and Bank of America, and she has been featured on the CBS Early Show and CNN, and in the New York Times. To have Laura Stack speak at an upcoming meeting or event, call 303-471-7401 or contact us online.

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